Harris accepts Democratic nod, slams Trump
WILMINGTON, US: Kamala Harris made history Wednesday when she accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president, while joining Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to condemn President Donald Trump’s profound ‘ failure’ as a leader.
Harris, the first black woman on a major party’s White House ticket, accused Trump of turning ‘ our tragedies into political weapons’. And she urged Americans to vote for Joe Biden, ‘a president who will bring all of us together’.
“Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives and livelihoods,” the former California prosecutor charged in her acceptance speech. “We’re at an inflection point.” Biden, who faces Trump on Nov 3, is due to give his own acceptance speech yesterday, closing a Democratic convention held wholly online and on television due to coronavirus safety precautions.
Shortly before Harris spoke, America’s first black president, Barack Obama, delivered his own condemnation of Trump — and appeal for Biden’s election.
Obama said that on handing over the White House to
Trump in 2017, he thought the Republican “might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.”
“But he never did,” Obama said. As a result, Trump has le America’s “worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before,” Obama said.
Trump responded by telling reporters that Obama had been ‘a terrible president’.
Former first lady and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who narrowly lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump, pleaded with voters to take nothing for granted in another tight contest.
“This can’t be another would-a-could-a-should-a election,” she said.
Young activists addressed the dangers of climate change and Hispanic immigrants made highly emotional critiques of Trump’s policies that they said had torn apart their families.
Much focus was on Obama, who remains a giant force in the
Democratic establishment.
Although he took a back seat during the Democratic primaries, he is now campaigning hard for Biden.
“Tonight, I am asking you to believe in Joe and Kamala’s ability to lead this country out of dark times and build it back better,” he said in his speech.
Obama spoke two days a er his wife, Michelle Obama, opened the convention with a scathing takedown of Trump as ‘the wrong president for our country’.
Biden, 77, the former Delaware senator who served as Obama’s vice president for eight years, was officially nominated on Tuesday.
Harris, the California senator whom Biden picked to be his vice president, will speak live from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden’s hometown and campaign headquarters.
The nomination is the latest in a lifetime of firsts for the 55year-old daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother who were immigrants to the US.
Harris was the first black attorney general of California, the first woman to hold the post, and the first woman of South Asian heritage to be elected to the US Senate. — AFP